These routines are provided for writing portable software that uses libtiff; they hide any memory-management related issues, such as dealing with segmented architectures found on 16-bit machines.

_TIFFmalloc and _TIFFrealloc are used to dynamically allocate and reallocate memory used by libtiff; such as memory passed into the I/O routines. Memory allocated through these interfaces is released back to the system using the _TIFFfree routine.

Memory allocated through one of the above interfaces can be set to a known value using _TIFFmemset, copied to another memory location using _TIFFmemcpy, or compared for equality using _TIFFmemcmp. These routines conform to the equivalent ANSI C routines: memset, memcpy, and memcmp, repsectively.